Saturday, September 05, 2009

Gail Collins' "ghoulish" summer news quiz is amusing, with its reminiscences of people packing heat to town hall meetings, governors and state senators confessing to affairs and undergoing indictment for assaulting girlfriends, and demagogues screaming about death panels and babbling about dead fish. But it does make you wonder, however fleetingly, if we're in the last days of empire.

About Me

I'm a freelance writer and media consultant with a lasting interest in how democracy works, how it malfunctions and self-corrects. Since fall 2013 I've focused increasingly on the unfolding drama of Affordable Care Act implementation and health reform more generally.
I have a Ph.D. in medieval English literature and a propensity to parse the rhetoric and logic of our political leaders as well as that of media pundits and scholars who jump into the national debate. I wrote a dissertation on the remarkably humane and subtle medieval English anchorite Julian of Norwich, a mystic nun whose knack of squaring circles and framing paradoxes reminds me a little of our current president. A sampling of that work (mind the google gaps) is here: http://bit.ly/OzwsrR